Wednesday, April 7, 2010

I actually have been blogging quite regularly--sort of. I've been reading quite a bit, researching steadily if not on anything earth-shattering, but whenever I make a blogpost, I just save it as a draft. Then I realize I'm just journaling, and that nobody should care about what book I just read or what youtube video I just watched. For example, Walter Benjamin wrote that because of letters to the editor, people would no longer be content to be readers, but would want a share in the author function. Then again, he never had to suffer through a facebook note about 17 things I didn't know about someone I once sat behind in chemistry. Would this warrant a blog post?

I had the strangest experience last night. I was reading an august, overpriced, east-coast based magazine that Conde Nast target-markets to all of my demographic. Am I ironic and vaguely liberal, yet pragmatic? Check. Am I a self-consciously critical consumer who's hopelessly susceptible to Elektra/Nonesuch's marketing practices? Check.

By the way, Nonesuch, EVERYBODY THROWS AWAY YOUR STUPID CARDBOARD SLEEVES THE SECOND THEY BUY THE CD. Or am I the only one who still buys CDs?

My assignment for the night was to read three articles by Christopher Waterman on Yoruban identity and pop music, of course via PDF. My weary eyes had to take a break, and lo and behold, found myself flipping through the New Yorker.

By the way, David Remnick, YOU'RE NOT FOOLING ANYONE WITH THOSE 90 PAGE SUMMER DOUBLE ISSUES. Or am I the only one who still buys magazines?

Anyway, I was in a vaguely African frame of mind, so picked up the magazine and turned to a mammoth Jeffrey Goldberg article (good job, Jeffrey Goldberg--now that's content!) on Mark and Delia Owens, who ended up settling in a giant game park in Zambia, away from modern conveniences save for, you know, a Cessna. After early experiments in infrastructural investment (proto-micro-lending), Mark Owens started to go all Colonel Kurtz on suspected poachers.

I was reading along in a special room I reserve for magazine reading, and ran into this passage:

We received a radio message that Bernard Mutondo [one of the commercial poachers] was coming to camp to shoot elephants, to kill them. . . . That evening I went to the airstrip with Kasokola, my most trusted assistant. And I took the door off the airplane and turned the right-hand seat around and strapped him in, with a shotgun across his lap. No, this wasn’t loaded with conventional ammunition. It was loaded with a special shell that shoots firecrackers. . . . It shoots cherry bombs, honestly. And it projects these to one hundred yards, and they go off with a tremendous roar and a flash of light and smoke and everything. And they’re perfectly harmless—farmers use these things to scare marauding animals away from their crops . . . but of course poachers wouldn’t know that.

Except, I think that in the print edition, it just said "Mutondo was coming to camp..." Whatever, if you write hard-hitting, time-sensitive long-form journalism, I'll forgive a referent error (it was Mutondo's first mention in the story). But, without even thinking about it, instinct kicked in, and my left hand (which was holding the bottom of the magazine) moved to the corner and made the Ctrl-F keystroke.

Yes, even in my most revealing, media-as-extensions-of-man moment, I'm a budget PC user.

The point stuck with me, though: maybe the iKindlePad's time has come. Now, if only Acer would come out with a competing product with all the same features, a lower price, more memory, a propensity to overheat, and a much clunkier interface, I too could get an e-Reader.

Wait: I'm in a coffeeshop, my headphones have stopped working, and two undergraduates are comparing third person voice in Tolkien and Hemingway's Farewell to Arms.

For a minute, I'm going to quote their conversation: "I guess he's known for his short sentences, but some of these go on for a long time. And it's not annoying like James Joyce. Sometimes Jane Austen is good, but she's a bit aristocratic...I like Old Man and the Sea because it's simple, but it's epic. It's like the human struggle. I like that...Fitzgerald is a lot like this. I honestly haven't read a lot, though."